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ITP 11: Flag by Jasper Johns
Next Tuesday being American Independence Day, this week’s picture is Flag, by Jasper Johns, painted in New York between 1954 and 1955. The...
ITP 1: Noli me Tangere, by Titian
What was it like on the very first Easter morning, when Mary Magdalene found herself face to face with the risen Christ? Titian’s Noli me...
Liquid asset
“Royal River” at the National Maritime Museum.
“Royal River”, guest-curated by David Starkey, explores the many...
Vittorio Sella Photographs
“Frozen in Time: The Mountain Photography of Vittorio Sella” at the Estorick Foundation. Review by Andrew...
ITP 208: St George by Donatello
Today is the Sunday before St George’s Day (April 23) so this week’s work of art is a justly celebrated marble sculpture of...
ITP 212: Laocoon by El Greco
The National Gallery’s once-in-a-lifetime El Greco exhibition closes next Sunday, so this week’s picture is one of the star...
ITP 87: Wrapped Trees by Christo
With just nine shopping days to go until Christmas, this week’s picture is a gift-wrapped piece of modern art by Christo, the open-air sculptor...
ITP 263: Pentecost by El Greco
In the Christian calendar today is Pentecost Sunday, so this week’s picture is Pentecost by Domenikos Theotokopoulos, better...
The End of the World
There are times when the end of the world seems even more nigh than usual. Ends of...
Seurat’s Bathers by Howard Hodgkin
Three years ago the Director of the National Gallery, Neil MacGregor, asked Howard Hodgkin if he would like to be involved in an exhibition...
Chardin
After the airborne follies of the rococo; after the acres of shot silk and the teasing glances of a thousand sportive mythological nudes; after...
Paul Klee
Hitler and his friends thought Paul Klee the very model of the mad modern artist....
Jeff Koons
According to the eternally youthful and perpetually controversial Jeff Koons, whose...
The ICA at Sixty Years Old
In aptly eccentric fashion, the Institute of Contemporary Arts is celebrating its 60th anniversary in the year when it actually turns 61. The...
Robert Frank at Tate Modern 2004
On 19 December 1955 Lieutenant R.E. Brown of the Arkansas State Police noted down the reasons for his arrest of “a subject later identified as...
The Norwich School
In a corner of the sunlit, reedy pool, next to the rutted track, beneath the branches of the ancient oak tree, the painter has included a group...
Tintoretto
Just who was Jacopo Robusti, alias Tintoretto? Something of a...
Alfred Munnings
The eminent equestrian painter Sir Alfred Munnings chose a spring evening in 1949 to give vent to his long bottled-up contempt for...
Paint by Numbers
Growing up in the 1960s, I only experienced the fag end of the craze for paint-by-numbers. I remember the keyed palettes and the enigmatic...
Painting Quickly
Modern life, by the 1860s, was looking increasingly hectic and perplexing. As towns expanded; as the train threatened to replace the horse-drawn...
Pisanello
Antonio di Puccio, otherwise known as Pisanello, after his native town of Pisa, was once the most...
The Genius of Rome
Called before the Roman magistrates in March 1613 to give evidence at the trial of Agostino Tassi, fellow...
Vermeer and the School of Delft
Johannes Vermeer, whose career spanned twenty years and whose known oeuvre comprises (at the latest count) just thirty-four...
American Landscapes
“There are those who through ignorance or prejudice strive to maintain that American scenery possesses little that is interesting or truly...
Nobuyoshi Araki
To judge by his new book Nobuyoshi Araki, the self-proclaimed bad boy of Japanese art photography, has thoroughly mastered the gnomically...
Fabric of Vision
“Fabric of Vision”, the main event at the National Gallery this summer, is based on such a strong and simple theme – fabric...
Harry Wingfield
Now aged 92, Harry Wingfield is on the verge of his first ever retrospective exhibition, which opens at the...
Berthe Morisot
On 3 April 1876 Albert Wolff, the irascible and reactionary art critic of Le Figaro,...
Barnett Newman
Barnett Newman painted big pictures and made correspondingly large claims about them. In the early 1960s, when quizzed by a sceptical...
Luca Signorelli
Unlike his contemporaries Leonardo, Raphael and Michelangelo, Luca Signorelli never quite made it through to posterity as a household name....
Duane Hanson
Duane Hanson grew up in the American Midwest in the mid-1930s and concluded early on in life that he was “the only oddball in the...
Jean-Pierre Khazem’s Mona Lisa
Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa is said to be five hundred years old this year. Art-historically minded party-poopers point out that...
Artists’ Assistants
The use of artists’ assistants is as old as art itself. The Greek sculptor Phidias was for millennia credited with the creation of the...
Thomas Jones
On 2 July 1954 an unheralded portfolio of about fifty watercolours and oil sketches was put...
Titian
The artist and biographer Giorgio Vasari visited Tiziano Vecellio, alias Titian, in his studio in...
Andy Goldsworthy
Andy Goldsworthy is a refreshingly down-to-earth sculptor, so much so that he is happy to spend weeks on end up to his knees in mud if a...
Stubbs, an appreciation
There are those who misguidedly believe that they cannot possibly be interested in the work of Stubbs,...
Writing to Vermeer
The British film-maker, painter and wandering intellectual Peter Greenaway has been writing love letters to a Dutchman who died more than three...
Gary Hume
“The very reasons that painting’s thought to be dead are the reasons I love it. It’s very old....
Goya
The mercurially brilliant Spanish painter, engraver and draughtsman Francesco de...
Save Titian's Diana and Actaeon
Enter Actaeon the huntsman, stage left, into a world of startling beauty. He has stumbled on the goddess Diana and her handmaidens while they...
Profile of Nick Serota
“Whenever the people who work with me get downhearted,” says Nick Serota, “I remind them of...
Surrealism
They refuse to go away, those old disturbing images, dreamed up long
ago but each still as vivid as a...
Tomoko Takahashi
Tomoko Takahashi’s playful agglomerations of detritus gleaned from skip or tip must seem like a godsend to tabloid...
Wolfgang Tillmans
In the winter of 2000, shortly after becoming the first non-British Artist ever to be awarded the Turner Prize, the German-born photographer...
Gauguin: Maker of Myth
Paul Gauguin painted himself compulsively, each time finding that he had turned into someone new. In the low-toned Self-Portrait of 1876 he is the...
Weegee
“I have no inhibitions, and neither has my camera. I have lived a full life and have tried everything. What may be...
Edward Hopper at Tate Modern 2004
The first painting that confronts visitors to Tate Modern’s Edward Hopper retrospective is a small, greyish work in oils on board entitled...
Renaissance
Introduction
It was in Italy, surrounded by the ruins of the ancient world, that men first dreamed of reviving the spirit of...
The Coventry Doom
Long obscured by the whitewash of the Reformation, then buried beneath the discoloured varnish of a botched nineteenth-century restoration job, a...
Jackson Pollock
When Jackson Pollock posed in front of his ancient Model T Ford for photographer Hans...
Miro at the Centre Pompidou 2004
In September 1917 the twenty-four-year-old painter Joan Miro wrote to his fellow Catalan and close friend Josef Francesc Rafols about the art of the...
Raphael at the National Gallery
Meet Raffaello Sanzio from Urbino: an urbane and smooth-shaven young man, with the trace of a pout, long floppy hair poking out from under his plain...
New Blood at the Saatchi Gallery 2004
A long, long time ago, in the mid-1980s, the Saatchi Gallery opened in Boundary Road in north-west London. The gallery was very white and light, very...
Vermeer and Tracy Chevalier's
Arguably the week’s most loudly trumpeted event in the field of the visual arts took place not in an art gallery, but in the cinema, with the...
Vuillard at the Royal Academy 2004
The scene is the dining room of a Parisian apartment at night. The dramatis personae are the assembled members of the family of Edouard...
100 Per Cent English
Genealogy, the modern form of ancestor worship, has become suddenly fashionable. It has never been easier for people...
Art Basel 37
The Basel Art Fair is the summer’s most keenly scrutinised barometer of key trends in the international modern and contemporary art market. Who...
Bill Viola
In London, the American video artist Bill Viola (b. 1951) is showing an exceptionally powerful group of new works at the Haunch of Venison Gallery...
Candice Breitz at Baltic, Gateshead
The South-African born, Berlin-based artist Candice Breitz first shot to international art-world stardom with an installation simply entitled...
The Invention of British Art
In the age of the multimillionaire Brit Artist, with the likes of Damien Hirst commanding a million pounds and more – considerably more, if art...
Richard Long at Haunch of Venison
Richard Long, who recently turned sixty, has always taken a nomadic approach to the making of art. Sculptor without a studio, he has spent the...
Modernism at The V & A
As an exercise in biting off more than anyone could realistically be expected to chew, the V & A’s exuberant sprawl of an exhibition,...
Dan Flavin at The Hayward Gallery
A low hum greets visitors walking into the Hayward Gallery’s large restrospective of Dan Flavin (1933-96), an American artist who spent almost...
Howard Hodgkin, at Tate Britain
Pablo Picasso defined the difficulty of being a modern artist better than anyone. “Beginning with Van Gogh,” he said, “however...
Diane Arbus at the V&A 2005
“Diane Arbus: Revelations”, which opened last week at the Victoria and Albert Museum, is the first retrospective of this brilliant and...
Candice Breitz at White Cube 2005
Susan Sarandon is worried about her love life. She feels frigid when she is with her husband, they hardly ever have sex, and when they do she is...
Anthony Caro at Tate Britain
Tate Britain’s retrospective of Anthony Caro’s sculpture begins, in the Duveen Sculpture Galleries, with a recent, monumental work by...
Dada at The Centre Pompidou
The art movement known as Dada – or DADA! as some of the more emphatic Dadaists preferred to spell it – was so fluid that it baffled even...
Drawing
“Drawing is the probity of art,” declared the nineteenth-century French painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, staunch upholder of...
Roger Fenton at Tate Britain 2005
It is the autumn of 1857 and Roger Fenton, pioneering photographer, is out in the field. To be precise, he is perched on a bridge overlooking a gorge...
Frida Kahlo at Tate Modern
Frida Kahlo was once principally known as the long-suffering wife of philandering Mexican muralist Diego Rivera. But during the half-century since...
Anselm Kiefer at White Cube 2005
The German artist Anselm Kiefer’s studio complex, which occupies seventeen acres of countryside near the town of Barjac, in the South of...
The Westminster Retable
The vigour with which the iconoclasts of the English Reformation once exterminated religious art is encapsulated in the diaries of William Dowsing...
August Strindberg at Tate Modern
August Strindberg (1849-1912) is famous as a writer, the author of numerous novels as well as more than seventy plays, a man widely regarded as one...
The Battle for British Art: How
In the age of the multimillionaire Brit Artist, with the likes of Damien Hirst commanding a million pounds and more – considerably more,...
Rodin at the Royal Academy 2006
In 1898, in one of his conversations with Joachim Gasquet, the painter Paul Cezanne turned for a moment to the subject of Auguste Rodin...
Velazquez at the National Gallery
Edouard Manet, no mean painter himself, was in no doubt when it came to the question of who was the best of all: Diego Rodriguez da Silva y...
David Smith at Tate Modern
In 1951, the American sculptor David Smith wrote a series of notes about life in his studio at Bolton Landing, on Lake George in New York State....
I, Samurai
A little over a year ago I saw a remarkable exhibition of samurai swords at the British Museum. Sharp enough to...
“Drawn from the Collection
“Drawn from the Collection”, new at Tate Britain, is a good old-fashioned miscellany of an exhibition. It starts with a group of...
The Damien Hirst Auction
Beautiful Inside My Head Forever, Sotheby’s auction of Damien Hirst’s latest work, 223 lots in total, was an extraordinary...
The Palais des Beaux-Arts, Lille
Much fanfare has greeted the fact that when the new Eurostar terminal opens at St Pancras, in three days’ time, it will bring Paris even...
The Courtauld Cezannes
Samuel Courtauld was a bold and perceptive collector, who dared to buy paintings by the likes of Renoir, Gauguin and Van Gogh at a time when...
Millais at Tate Modern
When John Everett Millais enrolled at the Royal Academy Schools in 1840, at the tender age of eleven, he was instantly...
“A New World” at The British Museum
In the late eighteenth century the Earl of Charlemont acquired a mysterious album of watercolours, filled with curious images of the flora, fauna...
The Prado extension; Velazquez
Dark-suited and silver-haired, Rafael Moneo is the endearingly self-effacing architect responsible for the new extension to the Prado in Madrid. A...
The Venice Biennale 2007
In the heat of the summer, Venice’s main public garden, known as the Giardini, is usually a quiet and...
The Turner Prize Exhibition 2008
The original function of the Turner Prize, inaugurated in 1984, was to reward the best British artists and to create a stir about contemporary...
"Babylon" at the British Museum
“Babylon”, opening imminently at the British Museum, is a vigorously revisionist, thoroughly engrossing and ultimately shocking...
The Towner Art Gallery
The seaside town of Eastbourne, in the lea of Beachy Head, owes much to the philanthropic impulses of Alderman Chisholm Towner. Back in 1920, he...
“Baroque” at the V & A.
“Baroque: Style in the Age of Magnificence” is one of the richest, most sense-stunning exhibitions ever mounted by the...
Futurism at Tate Modern
Carlo Carra painted his Portrait of the Poet Marinetti in 1910. The author sits at his desk, eyes blazing, chewing so hard...
Per Kirkeby at Tate Modern
Just who is being murdered in The Murder in Finnerup Barn? Painted in 1967, the picture hangs at the start of the Danish...
“Radical Nature” at the Barbican
“Radical Nature” is an earth summit in the form of an art exhibition. Green thoughts abound, albeit not in a green shade but in the...
"Pop Life" at Tate Modern
Rumour has it that the organisers of Tate Modern’s would-be autumn blockbuster originally wanted to call it “Sold Out”. The...
The Ashmolean revived
Next Saturday the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford will reopen following the completion of a £61 million pound redevelopment. Rick...
Round up of 2009 exhibitions
This has been a vintage year for exhibitions, starting with “Rodchenko and Popova: Defining Constructivism” at Tate Modern and...
Arshile Gorky
In the years after the Second World War a new form of American modern art was born. Bold and monumental, resolutely non-figurative, Abstract...
Henry Moore at Tate Britain
Henry Moore’s reputation has suffered since his death in 1986. He has fallen somewhat out of fashion, and must himself be held partly...
Jenny Holzer at Baltic
“The beginning of the war will be secret”, threatens a huge banner on the side of the red-brick Baltic in Gateshead. It is the...
Caravaggio, 400 years on
Four hundred years ago, in July 1610, the painter known as Caravaggio set out on his last journey. He was...
Paul Sandby at the Royal Academy
Ever since his death two hundred years ago Paul Sandby (1731-1809) has been damned with faint praise as “the father of English watercolour...
It's always the thought that counts
RICHARD HAMILTON is known as the great image-manipulator of post-war British art, and most of his best-known works have taken the form of canny...
A Marathon of Mediocrity
TRADITIONAL German insult: ''Ab nach Kassel''. This translates as ''go to Kassel'' and it means, roughly, ''I never want to see you again, leave...
Well Executed
A FEW years ago a German artist called nearly killed me. It was at the press view of the Hayward Annual in 1986 and I was watching one of her...
Channel Hopping
IN 1817 it took John Sell Cotman 42 hours to make the crossing from Brighton to Dieppe. Having got over his travel sickness (this took another day...
Piecing it together
It has been clear for a while now that Sir Anthony Caro, alias ''Britain's most distinguished living sculptor'', is going through some kind...
Dismembered Vision
It was brought to London in 1820 by a showman called William Bullock and advertised as ''Monsieur Jer-ricault's sic great picture, 24 feet long by...
Beyond Price
There's a recession on in the art world, just like everywhere else, although the way most commercial galleries act you'd never guess. Same old...
Where great art is stock-in-trade
AT WHICH London art gallery could you have seen, during the last five years, the following twentieth-century works of art? Picasso's Buste de...
Making an Honest Woman
THE lady in the white fur hat sat for her portrait in a quiet, well lit room somewhere in London one day in 1426 or 1427. There may have been...
Postcards from the edge
Yve Lomax writes, in the catalogue to ''Outer Space'', of a moment not too far in the future when ''im-ages will only refer to other images,...
Corridors of power
Pieter Saenredam's Interior of the Buurkerk, painted in 1644, detains few visitors to the National Gallery. It is such a quiet and unassuming...
A Rough Magic
REMBRANDT was a thoroughly inconsistent and frequently inept artist. He often got things wrong in his paintings, treating the human form with a...
Strangely Moving
A mobile, one might say, is a little private celebration, an object defined by its movement and having no other existence. It is a flower that...
Art of darkness
It begins so promisingly. Our hero, silhouetted against a brightening dawn sky, stares boldly into his future. He is every German mother's dream,...
Great White Hopes
THERE'S no getting round the shark: a ton or so of pure killer instinct suspended, in perpetuity, inside a gigantic glass tank filled with...
Dismembered Vision
Doubletake'', at the Hayward, is a large exhibition of contemporary art devoted to the theme of, um, er, what was it again? Oh yes: ''Collective...
Generation Gaps
Young artists have a reputation for wildness that is not entirely deserved. In fact, many of them tend to be fairly conformist, which is why their...
A Whiff of Gout Libre
IN 1870 Camille Pissarro took refuge in London from the Franco-Prussian War and found the city a less than congenial bolt-hole. ''It is only...
No Bones About It
THE V&A'S ''The Art of Death'' was postponed when the Gulf War broke out, presumably because it was felt that its subject was, er, a little...
Worlds Apart
MAYBE IT will always be the Orient's fate to exist, in the Occident, as a fantasy: not a real complex of cultures but a distant catalyst for the...
Art of Stone
VASARI tells us that Andrea Mantegna ''was so kind and lovable that he will always be remembered'', but not everyone found him memorable for those...
A Burn up for the Books
''SUCCESSFUL art can be depended upon to explain itself,'' wrote Clement Greenberg in Art and Culture. John Latham, a retrospective of whose work...
On a wing and a prayer
There might be as many as a hundred of them on your mantelpiece and there is, almost certainly, one on top of your tree, but the chances are you...
The rocking horse winner
AT THE AGE of fourteen, she is said to have lifted her skirts to a Catholic priest. The story has it that she had no underwear on. ''What do you...
Hatching out a world
The image is striking, but so simple, composed from so little, that it draws you in. You want to get close, almost to hold a magnifying glass to...
Regal Bearings
EVE IS IN the process of persuading Adam to include more fresh fruit in his diet, but he is yet to be convinced. He stands there, evidently...
Under the Limelight
It opened in October 1889 and, according to Le Figaro, quickly attracted a fashionable crowd. The clientele was said to consist of ''les artistes...
Lines of Thought
''A CRITIC at my house sees some paintings,'' wrote Gauguin in his Intimate Journals. ''Greatly perturbed, he asks for my drawings. My drawings?...
The calm before the form
James Turrell's lucid and beautiful art is hard to describe because it consists of almost nothing: a few partitions erected inside the gallery,...
A Bang! not a whimper
New York, 1962: the Pill has recently become available, the newspapers are full of John Glenn, the first man in orbit, and Andy Warhol is painting...
And this is now
Andrew Graham-Dixon talks to sculptor Julian Opie about the relevance of Pop Art to young artists working today.
AG-D: Is Pop Art...
That was then
Just what is it (to paraphrase Richard Hamilton) that makes Pop Art so different, so appealing? How can one explain Pop's unusually long...
A sense of purpose
There was a time when being an artist, in New York, was considered a noble and even heroic enterprise. Not any more. Those old notions have taken...
Living Statues
SIR WILLIAM Hamilton, the British ambassador to Naples and the connoisseur whose collection of Ro-man coins, Greek vases and other archaeological...
Hatching a Scheme
DAMIEN HIRST has worked with flayed cows' heads, maggots and dead fish. His latest exhibition, ''In and Out of Love'', includes a large number of...
Paint and Saints Alive
They dug Saint Hubert up in the year 743, 16 years after his death, and found his body to have been miraculously preserved from decay. So, at...
Walks on the wild side
Dry Walk is exemplary Richard Long, simple verging on banal, just 17 printed words on a large framed sheet of immaculate white paper: ''Dry Walk /...
Beasts of Burden
IT BEGAN with a wisecrack. Louis Vauxcelles, the art critic for Gil Blas, visited the Paris Salon d'Automne in 1905, noticed an Italianate bust...
Working the Land
What is a great Constable? Not just a pretty piece of landscape painting by a talented observer of Eng-lish scenery; not just a picture of trees...
Of an Uncertain Age
Looking at a Fiona Rae painting is rather like trying to follow a conversation conducted between eight people in an extremely crowded room with...
The Hair Apparent
Art audiences in London have been well served by the major exhibitions of recent years: they have seen late Picasso, early Cezanne and Monet's...
The Territory of Myth
Charles Baudelaire thought that ''Monsieur Camille Corot has the devil too seldom within him''. The modest Corot exhibition currently at...
Beyond the Pale
YOU CAN see red, feel blue, or be simply green, but everyone knows that colours aren't really codes for moods. The trouble with colour - which has...
The official versions
Lives change, and so do the ways in which they are memorialised. How, say, would Byron been re-membered if he had lived in the late twentieth...
Striking Images
ONE WAY of writing about the history of modern art (a fairly common way) is to describe it as a series of grand liberating gestures. Picasso...
Fear of Flying
HE WAS A painter but would have preferred, he said, a life in motor-racing. ''I would love to paint a beautiful picture to make quietness such as...
Back in the Year Dot
He died quite suddenly, of diphtheria, at 31. Few artists of comparable stature had briefer lives, but he somehow failed to qualify as a Tragic...
On the G-Plan Diet
A WONDER that they can stand at all, let alone stand to attention as they do. Thinner than anorexic, their defiance of their own frailty is what...
Washes Whiter
Not many people know that Adolf Hitler organised the century's most popular exhibition of modern art. It was called ''Entartete Kunst'', it toured...
The Writing is on the Wall
ART & LANGUAGE, who could be described as the Gilbert & George of British Conceptualism, have a reputation for being difficult. Robert...
Wrapped Attention
COVERAGE has always been a priority for Christo. If you weren't there in 1969, when he swathed a million square feet of the Sydney coastline in...
The Max Factor
MAX ERNST thought Dadaism was museum-proof. The idea of an exhibition on the subject, he said in later life, was ''a contradiction in terms - like...
Deeply Distressed
The Spouter Inn, New Bedford, in Melville's Moby Dick, had on its wall a strange painting, ''thoroughly besmoked, and every way defaced'', with...
Figuring the Landscape
Michael Andrews paints slowly, exhibits infrequently and keeps such a low profile that it was once written of him that ''he is in danger of being...
Mixed Blessings
IN 1937 PICASSO painted Guernica, Mondrian started work on Composition with Red Yellow and Blue and Stanley Spencer, a world away from the...
Drawing on the Past
THE ROYAL College of Art recently announced ''The reintroduction of drawing, as a discipline''. That this should qualify as news may surprise some...
Darkness in a Frame
KENNETH CLARK once wrote that ''Night is not a subject for painting''. He was wrong. For painters, the night has always been full of...
Late Shifts and Unhappy Endings
FRANCIS BACON once said that painting is an old man's game. Presumably he meant that an activity so beset with obstacles, so famously hard to...
Shows Must Go On.
The hero of Henry James's short story The Madonna of the Future is a painter who has been stuck on the same canvas - ''a mere dead blank, cracked...
By Numbers
YOUNG Jasper Johns, the numbers racketeer of the New York School, was a world away from his predecessors in American painting. Look at Ten...
The Appliance of Science
The National Gallery's new exhibition, ''Impressionism: Art in the Making'', pays tribute to some of the unsung giants of nineteenth-century...
A World of Difference
The open section of the Venice Biennale is a cattle market of new talent thronged with dealers, curators and critics on the look- out for that...
A Determined Misfit
Painting the Peasant Cemetery in Nuenen in 1885, Van Gogh aimed ''to express how these ruins show that for ages the peasants have been laid to...
The Unpleasant Taste of Success
Claes Ildenburg's unbuilt folly, the Maus Museum - a civic art gallery - in the shape of Mickey Mouse's head - is a fantasy with serious intent: a...
Leaving a Mark
IT IS AN awkward fact, not often acknowledged, that certain kinds of art are harder to argue for than others. Most people have very little...
Letters from the Landscape
Matisse once said that ''whoever wishes to devote himself to painting should begin by cutting out his own tongue''. A fairly radical...
Right from the Start
GAUGUIN's Tahitian idylls, fantasies of return to an uncomplicated, purely sensual existence; Picasso's angular, glaring Demoiselles d'Avignon,...
Exercise of the Object
What is it, exactly, that makes an object a work of art? The question was asked (and answered) most forcibly by Marcel Duchamp, when he submitted...
Acts of Public Decency
Public art, like other kinds, carries the risk of failure - but magnified since its flops, just like its masterpieces, are destined for...
Lighter than Air
The Biplane banks and soars, its pilot presumably about to perform a loop-the-loop or some other feat of aeronautical derring-do. Far below, from...
Every Colour Under the Sun
CLAUDE Monet may have been a great painter, but he was lousy company if you happened to be suf-fering from a terminal illness. ''Colour is my...
Strictly Members Only
WAR IS just around the corner, but you would never guess it from the expressions of the worthies gath-ered around the luncheon table in Frederick...
The World of Interiors
THE TERM ''installation'' is absent from the Thames & Hudson Dictionary of Art and Artists, which is odd in a volume that finds space for both...
A Land of Opportunity
Painters are often reluctant to discuss their own work and they have every reason to be cautious. Anything said may be taken down and used in...
The Midas Touch?
It is half past nine on a hot summer's night and around 200 people in the seminar room of the Institute of Contemporary Art are showing signs of...
Moving Furniture
TO MOST people, the Badminton Cabinet may well just look like a large and fantastically ornamental chest-of- drawers. The most splendid...
In The Dog House
AN UNSEEN hand has just thrown what seems to be a sackful of talcum powder over him, but no matter: Man Ray sits patiently for the camera, careful...
Thought that Counts
Follow the instructions and start your very own art collection. Put 50p in the slot, pull the handle and you're issued with a set of French...
Hanging in the Balance
IT MIGHT be described as the first Euro-hang of modern times. A few days ago Neil MacGregor, director of the National Gallery, announced what have...
In Need of a Sugar-Daddy
THE TATE Gallery Liverpool opened last year, you may recall, in a blaze of publicity. It rained most of the evening, while performance...
Winning Strokes
AS PRESSURE mounts from cultural organisations all over the world, it can only be a matter of time before the IOC designates art an official...
Bacon in Moscow
THE SOVIET General (Military Medical Services) inspected Francis Bacon's Head III, a screaming, simian ghoul painted in what looks like mud,...
A Shelter from the Storm
1927: MARY Moore, huge, heavy hands clasped in her lap, sits and waits for Henry to finish his drawing. There's a hint of impatience in her...
The Italian Job
RIGHT AT the start of the Royal Academy's whirlwind tour of 'Italian Art in the Twentieth Century', you come across a small, unassuming picture...
Pacific Overtures
NEAR THE end of the superb, once-in-a-lifetime Gauguin exhibition currently at the Grand Palais, you find the artist's Christ in the...
Drawing Analogies
'ASK MAESTRO Antonio how mortars are positioned on bastions day or night,' Leonardo da Vinci scribbled in one of his notebooks; 'ask Benedetto...
Catalan Graffiti
APART FROM providing one of his more expansively surreal titles, Joan Miro's Half Brunette Half Red-headed Girl Slipping on the Blood of Frozen...
The Philosophy of Wallpaper
Andrew Graham-Dixon reviews exhibitions of Walter Crane and 'The Last Romantics.
'STARING, wild-eyed, and clutching her 'fantastic...
Timber Merchants
Giuseppe Penone at the Arnolfini and Georg Herold at Karsten Schubert Gallery
NOT CONTENT with finding tongues in trees, books in the...
Comrades in Art
DEAR LEONID Ilyich, I am turning to you because you are the only one who can help me out of my plight. I am 79 years old and live alone in...
Positive Views
'Photography Now' at the V&A and the work of John Stewart.
NANCY BURSON, who makes what they call computer-generated composite...
Arts and Grafts
The photomontages of John Heartfield and New Concepts at the Ikon Gallery.
RAOUL HAUSSMANN and Hannah Hoch always claimed that they...
Bricks and Mortals
The recent work of Minimalist sculptor Carl Andre at the Anthony D'Offay Gallery.
LONG BEFORE he became famous as the creator...
The Elephant Man
An exhibition of paintings by Walter Sickert at the Tate Gallery in Liverpool.
CRITICS have never known quite what to make of Walter...
Glazed Expression
New installations by Richard Wilson in London, Bristol and Oxford.
SHE CAME in through the bathroom window / Protected by a silver spoon...
The Last Romantic?
Andrew Graham-Dixon on 'Ruskin and the English Watercolour' at the Whitworth Gallery in Manchester
'HAVE YOU not flattered him?' John...
A Bad Head for Figures
A major reexamination of Turner's attitude to the human figure.
RUSKIN called them 'roly-poly bag-of-potatoes people' and referred to...
The Small Change of Art
Exhibitions of work by Bruce Nauman, Robert Mangold and Anthony Green.
BRUCE NAUMAN has said that he is not interested in 'adding to a...
Life Set Upon a Cast
ANTONY Gormley's sculptures are, among other things, remarkable exercises in self-restraint. His working methods are unusual to say the least,...
Between the Lines
The stripe has been a staple of abstract art for over 50 years.
FEW YEARS ago, the abstract painter Sean Scully worked out that he must...
La Revolution Glorieuse
British Museum show examining the British response to the French Revo-lution
THE YOUNG labourer has returned home, and all's well with the...
The Feat of Klee
The Paul Klee collection from New York on show at the Tate Gallery.
IN THE restaurant run by my father, the fattest man in...
From Aztec to High-tec
The Hayward Gallery's over-ambitious 'Art in Latin America' show.
'ART IN Latin America' goes in search of a coherent tradition in...
Body Language
Review of 'The Nude: A New Perspective' at the Victoria and Albert.
PORNOGRAPHERS prefer blondes. Clad in skimpy black underwear,...
Boys will be Beuys
Nostalgia and incomprehensibility in 'Art from Koln' at the Liverpool Tate Gallery.
IN BRITAIN, it seems, art is occasionally...
The Pea-Shooter
Rowlandson and the Royal Academy Summer Show.
BACK WHEN the Royal Academy was a force to be reckoned with, Sir Joshua Reynolds sternly...
Booked Up and Sold Out
Anselm Kiefer at Anthony D'Offay and Stephen Conroy at the Marlborough.
NO HALF measures for Anselm Kiefer: his London dealers Anthony...
Dependency Culture
'Scottish Art since 1900' at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh.
J D FERGUSSON's Rhythm, 1911, takes centre-stage in...
Movements in Modern Art
For reasons of cash and scholarship this is an era of well-travelled masterpieces.
AT FIRST sight the calendar on the wall of Jim...
Traces in the Sand
The first of a series exploring the use of shorelines in art, looking at the way painters convey the littoral truth.
IN 1867 the painter...
Monkey business
TOLEDO is thunderstruck. Gun-metal clouds writhe in a blustery, leaden sky. Below, the Cathedral and the Alcazar, huddled alliance of church and...
Solemn History into Art
Gerhard Richter's remarkable '18 Oktober 1977' show at the ICA.
AT 38 minutes past midnight on Tuesday 18 October, 1977, a newsflash...
Acquiring New Tastes
As art prices mount Andrew Graham-Dixon asks whether museums can afford not to add to their collections.
THIS MAY be remembered as the...
Art of Mass Reproduction
The major retrospective of Andy Warhol's work at the South Bank.
ANDY WARHOL was as boring as he set out to be, but he was also one of the...
Exchanging Peasantries
Different views of pastoral life in 'Gauguin and the School of Pont-Aven' at the RA.
PONT-AVEN is an unexceptional village a few miles...
The Painter of Fragments
An exhibition of the paintings of Edouard Manet at Ordrupgaard in Copenhagen.
HE IS THE model of sartorial elegance, in his sleek black...
Opening the Shutters
The formal acknowledgement of 'The Art of Photography' at the RA.
AFTER A century and a half of debate, it's official, or so we...
The Naming of Parts
Anthony Caro's return to sensual narrative at Knoedler and Annely Juda.
BRUCE MCLEAN attended St Martin's School of Art while Anthony...
The Printed Image in China
The British Museum’s main exhibition of the moment, “Fra Angelico to Leonardo: Italian Renaissance Drawings”, triumphantly...
The new Mostyn in Llandudno
Founded in 1902, the Mostyn Art Gallery in Llandudno has had a somewhat chequered history. It was originally the offspring of an idiosyncratic,...
Close Examination
''Fakes, Mistakes and Discoveries” at the National Gallery.
When Nicholas Penny became Director of the National Gallery he...
Rude Britannia
The American author E.B. White once remarked that “Humour can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards...
Wolfgang Tillmans, Serpentine
Wolfgang Tillmans at the Serpentine Gallery.
Wolfgang Tillmans is one of the most eclectic and intriguing of modern photographers....
Howard Hodgkin
Howard Hodgkin at Modern Art Oxford.
At the end of the 1980s the painter Howard Hodgkin was interviewed for Vogue by the late David...
Failed Romantics
Romantics Display at Tate Britain.
This summer’s new displays at Tate Britain were not greeted with much fanfare on their recent...
Charity begins at home
Frederick Cayley Robinson at the National Gallery.
In 1915 a now little known English painter named Frederick Cayley Robinson painted four...
All the hits and more
“Treasures from Budapest” at the Royal Academy.
A carved and gilded figure of St Andrew, with lank hair and an extravagantly...
A king's ransom
TOWARDS the end of the nineteenth century, the connoisseur Alfred Bredius went to Poland. After a difficult journey, Bredius later wrote, he...
Life's Rich Canvas
IT CAME as no great shock when, on Tuesday evening, John Richardson won the pounds 22,500 Whit-bread Prize for the first volume of his A Life of...
Poacher's Pie
THE SURREALISTS started it quite some time ago, but it is still going strong. These days, the unfa-thomable narrative painting - the picture that...
The Lady's not for Spurning
A somewhat tubby American tourist sidles up to one of the more famous paintings in the Musee d'Orsay and beams at his wife who faces him,...
He's just an old softy at heart
Typewriters, telephones, even toy aeroplanes - Claes Oldenburg has a way of making the stuff of urban life look good enough to eat.
Hanging in the balance
The National Gallery re-hang: Andrew Graham-Dixon discusses the proposals and asks the experts for their views
IT MIGHT be described as the...
History's broad canvas
Andrew Graham-Dixon reports on an exhibition dedicated to a forgotten school of British history painting
Enter Friar Lawrence, stage left,...
Je m'accuse
Andrew Graham-Dixon helped to judge this year's Turner Prize. He found it most revealing
WHEN I accepted an invitation to sit on the jury...
An artist's impression
Andrew Graham-Dixon on Rachel Whiteread's bedsit, Joseph Beuys's old room and the Courtauld's new home
Rachel Whiteread's Ghost is a pale...
Old frames of reference
Andrew Graham-Dixon finds artists with their backs to the future in 'On Classic Ground' at the Tate Gallery
Hung on a wall the colour of...
The painter and decorator
Andrew Graham-Dixon looks at the frescoes of Tiepolo in Venice and his drawings currently on show in London
In 1739, grateful for services...
Chaos on the canals
Andrew Graham-Dixon reports from the Venice Biennale 1990 on porn-queens, carrier bags, truisms and prizes
Some things never change. The...
An Englishman abroad
Andrew Graham-Dixon assesses Matthew Smith's reputation, revived at the Crane Kalman Gallery
You can't fault his references. In 1926, his...
Just dismember this
Andrew Graham-Dixon on 'Louise Bourgeois' at the Riverside and 'Decoy' at the Serpentine Gallery
Robert Mapplethorpe took a famous...
The real thing
Andrew Graham-Dixon on crude bat-tle lines in 'The Pursuit of the Real' at the Barbican Art Gallery
REALISM, wrote the French art critic...
Skeletal operations
Andrew Graham-Dixon on fragile constructions by Julio Gonzales, and Glasgow's Great British Art Exhibition
THE CHANCES are that no one...
Drawing in the margin
Andrew Graham-Dixon on forgotten Czech modernists revived at MoMA, Oxford, and the ICA
A group of artists, architects, writers, designers...
Birds of a feather
Andrew Graham-Dixon on the world turned upside-down in the work of Georg Baselitz, at the D'Offay Gallery
IS GEORG BASELITZ the greatest...
Much possessed by death
Andrew Graham-Dixon reviews a retrospective show of the work of Christian Boltanski at the Whitechapel Gallery
Photography, it has often...
The flowering of a genius
Andrew Graham-Dixon reviews the two major exhibitions marking the Van Gogh centenary in the Netherlands
It is late. The candle, which has...
The unreal thing
Andrew Graham-Dixon on imitations and permutations in the British Museum, Hyde Park and your liv-ing-room
Masterpieces, everyone knows,...
Out of the vortex
Andrew Graham-Dixon on the varied apostasies of Edward Wadsworth, on show in Camden
In 1930, six years after the acrimonious termination of...
Smoke on the water
Andrew Graham-Dixon reports on a Camille Pissarro show which looks beyond the subject matter
What began as a rebellion against the...
A model society
Andrew Graham-Dixon visits 'Britain's most popular sculpture gallery'
WHEN MADAME Tussaud published the first catalogue to her waxworks,...
An artist does the strand
We asked the sculptor Andy Goldsworthy to create a special beach piece. Andrew Graham-Dixon talked to him about it
ANDY GOLDSWORTHY has...
Futures market
Andrew Graham-Dixon on the Independent Group at the ICA and 'Plastics Age' at the V & A
WELCOME to the Fun House. Robbie the Robot is...
Finding Mr Wright
Andrew Graham-Dixon on faith and rea-son in the paintings of Wright of Derby, currently showing at the Tate
Circa 1762-3, four members of...
Vision and revision
Andrew Graham-Dixon on a retrospective exhibition of Arshile Gorky's paintings at the Whitechapel Gallery
WE LIVE, it is often said, in a...
Pupils of the cool school
Andrew Graham-Dixon on compromised choices in 'The British Art Show' at the McLellan Galleries, Glasgow
There is no figurative painting in...
Coals to Newcastle
Andrew Graham-Dixon on a new show that examines the artistic patrons of Victorian Tyneside
IN 1844 The Penny Magazine carried a description...
Experts cast doubt on 20 'Rembrandts'
AT LEAST 20 paintings long thought to be by Rembrandt were not painted by the great Dutch seven-teenth-century artist, according to an influential...
Pride and prejudice
Andrew Graham-Dixon on 'The Other Story' at the Hayward and Anish Kapoor at the Lisson Gallery
IN 1903 the Whitechapel Art Gallery staged...
The graphic details
Andrew Graham-Dixon on four centuries of satire in Bolton Art Gallery's 'Folly and Vice'
BOLTON Museum and Art Gallery's main contribution...
Shows on the road
Britain missed out on some of the Eighties' biggest and best exhibitions. Andrew Graham-Dixon finds out why
NEIL MACGREGOR, the Director of...
Walking wounded
Andrew Graham-Dixon on new work by the sculptor Bill Woodrow at the Imperial War Museum
THESE DAYS, the Imperial War Museum is a cleaner,...
Cracks in the official version
Andrew Graham-Dixon reviews an exhibition of the paintings of Jacques-Louis David at the Louvre in Paris
SIMPLICITY is the key - the...
Finding knowledge in lost Rembrandts
The once impressive list of paintings by Rembrandt in the Wallace Collection is down to one. But the London museum's director is happy with the...
Rembrandt award for curator
THE DIRECTOR of the Wallace Collection was honoured yesterday by the Dutch art scholars who say that five of the London museum's six 'Rembrandts'...
The fabric of everyday life
Andrew Graham-Dixon on a major exhibition of work by Frans Hals at the Royal Academy
THE STANDARD verdict on Frans Hals goes roughly like...
TELEVISION / Back against the wall
Andrew Graham-Dixon on Omnibus's Tapies film
The grand old man of Spanish contemporary art, Antoni Tapies, came across on last night's...
Squaring up to reality
Andrew Graham-Dixon reviews 'Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism' at the Museum of Modern Art, New York
IT IS a peculiar fact that while...
Think about it
Andrew Graham-Dixon on Michael Craig-Martin's retrospective show at the Whitechapel Gallery
It is often said that too much art is...
Saatchi pays record for a Freud
Charles Saatchi, the advertising agency millionaire, has paid a record price for a painting by Lucian Freud, the British artist. The purchase of...
Artists under the influence
Artists have always depicted art as well as the world. Andrew Graham-Dixon reflects on changing attitudes to tradition in the visual...
Painter of painters
Andrew Graham-Dixon on one of the most improbable and remarkable exhibitions of modern times
THE YOUNG painter Diego Rodriguez de Silva y...
From a country retreat
Andrew Graham-Dixon on an exhibi-tion of landscape paintings by Ivon Hitchens at the Serpentine Gal-lery
IN AUGUST 1940, a German bomb...
A storm in a teacup
Andrew Graham-Dixon on works by the First Lady of Surrealism in 'Meret Oppenheim: A Retrospective'
SHE CAME to Paris in 1930, at the age of...
Obituary: Liz Arnold
LIZ ARNOLD was one of the most original and inventive painters of her generation.
The Renaissance author Giorgio Vasari observed that...
Vile bodies
Was it the vicious attack on the 'obscenity' of his Sistine Chapelnudes (by a pornographer) that sent Michelangelo in a different directionin his...
Holbein's inner game
In 1533 England was poised to opt out of Catholicism and Europe was in turmoil. Jean de Dinteville and Georges de Selve, the subjects of Holbein's...
Love's labours lost
Love is blind, they say, but not so blind we should be fooledinto mistaking the miscellaneous collection of sexual imagery now on show in Paris for a...
The virgin rebirth
Lucas Cranach probably painted more naked women than any other artist in history. But he only ever had one ideal figure in mind: the true Renaissance...
Immortal longings
In Roman Egypt, wax portraits were bound across the faces of mummified corpses as spells to defeat the finality of death. An exhibition at the...
Sandwich board
VISUAL ARTS Patrick Caulfield Waddington Galleries, London
Some years ago, the purchasing committee of the Government Art Collection...
Lonely echoes
Georges Braque worked on his painting L'Echo for three years on and off before deciding, one day in 1956, that he had at last finished it. We see a...
The name of progress
One evening towards the end of May 1732, William Hogarth went out to celebrate the enormous popular success of A Harlot's Progress. ...
Acting their socks off
The identity of the portly, bewigged gentleman with a book in one hand and an expression of inscrutable discomfort on his face is not...
Last of the great showstoppers?
This past year will largely be remembered for a number of remarkable exhibitions, especially, perhaps, Richard Kendall's brilliant "Late...
Hang the Christmas tree
Like the Puritans, who wanted to abolish Christmas, contemporary artists seem to have an inherent dis-trust of festivities. Educated, as so many of...
This is the house that Rachel built
Number 193 Grove Road used to be an unexceptional Victorian house in the East End of London. ''Mile End, E3 - 3 storey end of terrace Victorian...
Delusions of grandeur
Insight into the human condition or personal exorcism? The status of Hans Prinzhorn's collection of art by psychiatric patients is questionable -...
Blinded by the light
In 1797, a young JMW Turner embarked on a tour of England's 'barren and frightful' North. A revelation early one morning at Norham Castle gave his...
No one home
Visiting Hockney's latest show is like stepping aboard the MaryCeleste: the dachsunds are there - and the ghost of Picasso - but, beneaththe...
On the surface
Oxford's exhibition of new British painting glories in its modernistaesthetic: paint for its own sake, free of reference. But is it...
Spreading the word
The four shortlisted artists for this year's Turner Prize all have works on show at the Tate Gallery. So how come there's no one atthe exhibition,...
Joy Unconfined
Delight, vigour, passion. Rubens's landscape paintings gave expressionto his exuberant love of life. Constable hailed them as his greatest works....
Pablo: the biopic?
Question: when is a painting not a portrait? Answer: when it's a Picasso. Andrew Graham-Dixon argues that, by sticking models' nameson the...
Traces of greatness
The Raphael cartoons, now back on public view at the V&A, present a lost world of ideals. See them and marvel. By Andrew...
Club Med
The gentlemen of the Grand Tour weren't just passionate about the art of the ancient world, they had themselves painted into the scenery. By...
Alphabet; TEN YEARS IN THE ARTS
Andre, Carl In Andre's art it is as if the whole Western tradition of sculpture has been (literally) steamrollered. While other sculptors of his...
Alberto the thief
Giacometti, a show of tormented genius and in-disputable greatness? Not so
With his Einstein hair and his perpetual aura of grizzled...
Conjuring art out of thin air
For 10 years now, Rachel Whiteread has taken empty spaces – the void below a chair, the hollow beneath a mortuary slab - and turned theminto...
Acting from anterior motives
Hans Hartung, grandfather of modern abstract painting. Or so theartist considered himself to be. Andrew Graham-Dixon remains firmly unconvinced by...
Visions of the apocalypse
The National Gallery has acquired its first oil painting by Albrecht Durer. It is the only example by the 15th-century German artist to be found...
Say it with flowers
Politics, death and wonder. And you thought they were just Dutch flower paintings. By Andrew Graham-Dixon
It is difficult to know just what...
The burden of perfection
Sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen was all the rage in post-NapoleonicRome. They love him still in Denmark, where he is a national...
The artist formerly known as British
Paris has taken Francis Bacon as one of its own, a European painter with a vision of the uncertainties and fragmentation of the twentieth century,...
Thrown on the scrapheap
Social satire or an expression of the art-ist's terror of beingirrelevant and disposable? Andrew Graham-Dixon views Michael Landy's latest...
Knavery, trickery and deceit
As Degas's ballerinas and nudes disport themselves at the NationalGallery, Andrew Graham-Dixon detects the art beneath the artist's...
Under the axe
A late 15th-century wood carving of Jesse, found at St Mary's Priory Church, Abergavenny. The one 'unarguably great' wooden figure to survive...
British art - our best kept secret
Shoved aside in old vegetable crates, shut away in broom cupboards, strung upin gloomy galleries - much of the best of Britain's visual heritage...
Victorian vices
The Leighton blockbuster at the Royal Academy presents one view of an eminent painter loved by the establishment in his time. But does his work...
Degenerate and proud
Emil Nolde put instinct before intellect in his search for spiritual truths and artistic excellence. By Andrew Graham Dixon
Three...
The heartfelt tug of time
What was Turner saying in 'The Fighting Temeraire'? Was he harking back to a pre-industrial age? Or was he, at 64, rounding the last bend of the...
Every silver lining needs a cloud
Andrew Graham-Dixon feels left in the dark by Sir Ernst Gombrich's reflections on the history of the shadow in paintung
The pale,...
In the shadow of atrocity
It's a battle post-war German artists are still fighting: frowned on for mentioning Nazism, yet unable to find myths that are not tainted by it....
Great, on the face of it
The beauty of Richard Avedon's photography is strictly skin deep. Fortunately, says Andrew Graham-Dixon, he has developed an eye for sitters with...
In search of the edible woman
Never mind the quality, feel the flesh: Andrew Graham-Dixon on the Willem de Kooning retrospective at the Tate, London
The Tate Gallery's...
A dance to the music of time
'Unless you are mad, stupid, terminally narrow-minded or have some other such watertight ex-cuse, make sure you visit it.' Andrew Graham-Dixon...
Turner in his grave
The moment when . . . Andrew Graham-Dixon realised that the art of the past had been relegated to the status of the Safely...
The Louvre's lesson for London
In Paris they have a grand new Renaissance sculpture gallery, refurbished by the state. In Britain, we are still managing to make a high art of...
Anatomy of a genius
Despite recent claims to the contrary, Andrew Graham-Dixon believes that The Entombment is not only a Michelangelo, it is also the perfect...
The Painted Page
''The Painted Page'', at the Royal Academy, promises to be one of the most beautiful and absorbing exhibitions of the year. Drawn from several of...
Mother of all aesthetes
Andrew Graham-Dixon finds James McNeill Whistler, archetypal dandy and art-for-art's sake aesthete, too tasteful for his own good
Ruskin's...
As if Hitler never existed
The Deutsche Romantik festival has everything: music, art, literature . . . but there's a sinister omission.
How uplifting, how improving,...
The Two Gentlemen of Venice
Andrew Graham-Dixon sees 'The Glory of Venice' at the Royal Academy as a contest between two great painters, one famous, one unknown
When...
Making molehills out of mountains
'A largely incoherent jumble of insensitively hung pictures': Andrew Graham-Dixon on 'Monet to Matisse' at the National Gallery of...
The master builder
Franz Kline didn't talk much about his work - one reason, perhaps, why others haven't much either. Andrew Graham-Dixon on a forgotten...
Moving pictures
'No other modern artist has ever made paint look quite so unlike itself, so possessed with living qualities.' Andrew Graham-Dixon on...
The Kitaj myth
The man who would leapfrog his way into History on the backs of giants stands exposed.' Andrew Graham-Dixon on Kitaj at the Tate
R B Kitaj,...
The north face of painting
Andrew Graham-Dixon scales the heights of Friedrich and notes the tendency of Swiss artists to make molehills out of mountains
Orson...
Dreamer of dreams
Measured against Michelangelo's muscularity, Raphael can look cosy. Yet, argues Andrew Graham-Dixon, he achieved perfection.
Of the three...
So what did they leave out?
There's a bit of this, a bit of that at the Whitechapel Open and New Contemporaries. But there's a lot of the other. By Andrew...
The savagery of a dead sheep
Damien Hirst, sculptor, painter, curator and animal worrier, has gathered about him like-minded enfants terribles at the Serpentine. Andrew...
Small objects of desire
Boyd Webb makes still lifes from balloons and nails and Anaglypta wallpaper. This is a world in which ordinary objects are made flesh - nasty,...
The dying of the light
The man referred to as 'Spain's greatest living artist' has made a serious mistake, says Andrew Graham-Dixon; plus new work in London
The...
The Fluxshoe detective
Who or what was Fluxus and what did they or it want? Andrew Graham-Dixon searches for clues at the Tate, without much success
There are...
The secret meaning of snooker
Water Table is one of the simplest and oddest of all the creations from the installation artist Richard Wilson. By Andrew Graham-Dixon
I...
Not just a pretty face
Reynolds and Gainsborough, divided by technique and temperament, were united in their discontent with the narrow scope of 18th-century English...
Seeing, but not believing
As the chronicler of madness and despair, Goya was the first modern painter. Andrew Graham-Dixon on 'Goya: The Small Paintings'
The man in...
Sort of, almost, in a way, nearly
Is 'Unbound' at the Hayward Gallery a groundbreaking exhibition or a hotch-potch? Andrew Graham-Dixon on the nouvelle vague
The title,...
Ai Wei Wei at Tate Modern.
Artists enjoy a peculiarly ambiguous status in modern China. They are allowed freedoms of movement and expression denied to the vast majority of...
The bad dream of the flesh
'His life was, among other things, a prolonged act of metaphorical patricide': Andrew Graham-Dixon re-views 'Dali: The Early...
The texture of memory
Andrew Graham-Dixon on the ghostly 'memory' sculptures of Medardo Rosso on show at the Whitechapel gallery in London
A baffled...
The naked face
Pressing a face to the window of history: Andrew Graham-Dixon on Hans Holbein's portraits of the court of Henry VIII, at the NPG
Hans...
Picasso and the hand of God
There have been many Picasso exhibitions in recent years, but perhaps none has taken the viewer closer to the essence of the artist, has shown him...
She ain't heavy, she's my sister
Andrew Graham-Dixon reviews Jenny Saville at the Saatchi
Perched on a high stool, a large woman kneads her thighs and looks down her...
Faces of history
Andrew Graham-Dixon on David's Portrait of the Vicomtesse Vilain XIIII and Her Daughter, 'a masterpiece of frank and unaffected...
A word or two in your eye
It seemed a good idea at the time. That was in 1967. But has Lawrence Weiner finally served his sentence? By Andrew Graham-Dixon
Few...
The legend of the damned
Modigliani worked hard at his wild man reputation, but Andrew Graham-Dixon isn't convinced. Just look at the evidence at the R A . . .
He...
Try this for sheer size
You need six months and a pair of roller-skates to do justice to the new Louvre in Paris. Andrew Graham-Dixon flat-foots it in a day . ....
Prophets and loss
Vuillard and Bonnard were more than just chroniclers of bourgeois fin-de-siecle Paris, Andrew Graham-Dixon argues. They painted states of mind
A tale of two cities
Andrew Graham-Dixon reveals a visionary blend of the English and the Italianate in 'Canaletto and England'
In 1746 Antonio Canaletto...
From icon to Bacon
Holy Russian and unholy British art: Andrew Graham-Dixon compares an anonymous painter from Pskov with Francis Bacon
A thousand years...
Done up like a kipper
Ben Nicholson was a victim of his own caution. Even his most impressive works seem tainted by pastiche, Andrew Graham Dixon...
A quiet American
Andrew Graham-Dixon on nervous clarity and painful emotion in 'Thomas Eakin' at the National Portrait Gallery
WHEN THE 29-year-old...
A lot of bottle
A small piece of history was made last week with the unveiling of a large piece of Oldenburg. Andrew Graham-Dixon reports
CLAES...
Falling wide of the target
Andrew Graham-Dixon puzzles over the inclusions and exclusions from 'American Art in the 20th Century' at the Royal Academy
Jasper Johns...
Mr Orange and the seven wise men
He (it is always a he) shapes our perceptions of art and is threatened and abused for his trouble. Andrew Graham-Dixon on the International...
Making nothing out of something
Andrew Graham-Dixon reviews the Agnes Martin retrospective at the Serpentine, London
THERE IS a venerable tradition of American painting...
Out of the shadows, into the light
Andrew Graham-Dixon on 'The Waking Dream', Edinburgh
AT FIRST sight William Henry Fox Talbot's Botanical Specimen looks like nothing...
Peasant season
Andrew Graham-Dixon on Russian avant-garde art and a Peter Howson retrospective
KAZIMIR MALEVICH'S The Reaper is a disconcerting...
That way madness lies
'Everyone is an artist,' Joseph Beuys famously declared, but perhaps he should have added that not everyone should necessarily exhibit their work....
Sunk under the weight of culture
Andrew Graham-Dixon looks at the failed attempt to create a brave new world order at the Venice Biennale
VARIOUS theories have been...
Something out of nothing
'Paris post-War', sponsored by The Independent, opens on Wednesday. Andrew Graham-Dixon argues that existentialism is not so much a philosophy of...
The still, small voice of turmoil
Andrew Graham-Dixon studies small objects of desire in the work of Giorgio Morandi
HIS NICKNAME was ''Il Monaco'' (The Monk) and he...
The page of reason
''THE Paper Museum of Cassiano dal Pozzo'', a small part of which is currently on exhibition in the British Museum's department of prints and...
Putting a brave face on it
''I HAVE an exquisite gratification in painting portraits wretchedly,'' Benjamin Robert Haydon mischievously confided to his journal in the early...
Flirting with hippie chic
COUNTLESS mediocre 19th-century academic painters cashed in on the vogue for exotic subjects, travelling to far-off places and painting almost...
A legend in her own landscape
THE FIRST British retrospective of Georgia O'Keeffe's paintings, which opened at the Hayward Gallery last week, resoundingly confirms her genius,...
Adrift on the sea of interpretation
I WAS 15 when I first went, reluctantly, to the Louvre, and I didn't much like old pictures. I remember countless dark and obscure religious...
The bigger, the worse
The National Gallery's new exhibition, ''Tradition and Revolution in French Art 1700-1880'', might look like a case of thinly disguised...
Insulated from the shock of reason
It is hard to say which is more surreal, Robert Gober's new exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery or the way it has been received. The Metropolitan...
Still alive, but only just
THE WHITNEY Biennial is not just the world's largest regular exhibition of contemporary American art, but also one of the more conspicuous...
Chaos is come again
AMBITIOUS paintings can be irritating in much the same way that ambitious people can be irritating: forever insinuating their own importance in...
The sacrament of holy oils
ART HAS ALWAYS been a form of redemption, a transfiguration of the commonplace. The very act of turning something into an image, whether it is a...
Art after the deluge
This is when critics are traditionally required to deliver what is known as The End of Year Piece. They will summarise the most significant events...
The not so dumb animals
This might be the season of goodwill to all men, but it is a lousy month for farm animals. Killed, hung, cured, spiced, plucked, stuffed, roasted,...
A novel approach
Angelica Kauffman came to England from Switzerland in 1764 and spent 15 years here flaunting her own outrageousness: a founder member of the Royal...
False finish
PATRICK Caulfield is, among other things, the world's greatest painter of the pretentiousness of cheap restaurants. He is a subtle and...
Snapshots in paint
WALTER SICKERT's habit of basing paintings on news photographs shocked some people in the early decades of this century but now it makes him look...
Sunny side up
VISITING the Edvard Munch exhibition at the National Gallery in London is, as might be expected, a somewhat dispiriting experience. Even more so...
In a pig's eye
THE modern artist used to be thought of as an heroic figure: an ascetic of the studio far removed from the concerns of everyday life; someone...
Painting over the past
The exhibition ''Tancred and Erminia'', is not about Tancred and Erminia at all, argues Andrew Graham-Dixon. It is about second thoughts and about...
Sudden shafts of reality
Howard Hodgkin, who has been buying Indian paintings almost since he was a teenager, is the latest in a long line of artist-collectors, from...
Posture and imposture
A lot of the paintings in ''The Swagger Portrait'', at the Tate Gallery, have the character of dim and distant relics, the products of a world...
Accentuate the negative
Abstract artists often prefer to talk about what they are trying not to do in their work. What you end up with is the equivalent of a photographic...
Circling the square
SUSAN SONTAG once wrote that ''interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art'', but some art just won't be explained away. Cubism has...
Condensed controversy
THERE IS a sign on the door of Anthony D'Offay Gallery which says ''No one under the age of 18 may enter the exhibition''. The exhibition in...
Conference of strange deities
The Hayward Gallery's ''The Art of Ancient Mexico'' quickly establishes itself as one of the better hung exhibitions in London at the moment. Six...
Earning her stripes
Bridget Riley does not see things in black and white. ''All artists are mixtures,'' she says. ''They are complicated. I don't think they are...
Say it with flowers, pick the rose.
PICK THE rose. It used to symbolise the Virgin Mary and, before her, Venus, the pricking of its barbs being likened to the wounds of love. The...
Personal stereo
THE THIRD Earl of Bute had great legs (''the finest legs in Europe,'' according to a contemporary tribute) and he knew it. The artist Allan...
A bricklayer's view of the world
RUSKIN had a low opinion of Dutch art: ''The patient devotion of besotted lives to delineation of bricks and fogs, cattle and ditchwater.''...
Facial disfigurement
If the French no longer make much in the way of interesting art, they certainly know how to spice up its presentation. The ambition of earlier...
False impressions
PISSARRO called Sisley ''the typical Impressionist'' but this has come to seem more of a weakness than a strength. While his colleagues in the...
First up against the wall
Leonardo da Vinci once said that whenever he was stuck for an idea he would go out and stare at ''a wall covered with dirt''. In the chance...
A painter with Strong views
Canaletto and His Rivals at the National Gallery.
Giovanni Antonio Canal, otherwise known as Canaletto little canal was...
Lessons in how to shoot yourself
Andrew Graham-Dixon iooks into the camera's obedient mirror at the National Portrait Gallery
IN 1843 Elizabeth Barrett described the...
The world's your lobster
Andrew Graham-Dixon follows the trail of British Surrealism to Leeds and and dials D for Dali.
SALVADOR Dali's Lobster Telephone is the...
A painter of declining figures
The debris of the world examined closely in new work by Jonathan Waller and the Boyle family.
JONATHAN WALLER is an artistic scavenger. He...
Casting bestial myths in plaster
IF ARTISTS are the saints of the twentieth century, art galleries are the shrines at which we congregate to muse upon their relics. The...
Come into the garden, Claude
Andrew Graham-Dixon on the garener's cultivated pleasures
THE BRITISH have always preferred horticulture to culture. In the eighteenth...
Old age, serene and bright
Andrew Graham-Dixon on new abstraction from young Italian artists and an old master
WILLEM DE KOONING'S recent paint¬ings (D'Offays)...
Piece with no title
Andrew Graham-Dixon on putting a name to a canvas
JULIAN Schnabel's modestly titled painting, Portrait of God, is an abstract...
Fully automatic
Andrew Graham-Dixon investigates the visions of André Masson and hears the sound of One Hand Clapping
THE RULES were simple....
Anywhere but Glasgow
The Glasgow Boys at the Royal Academy.
The late Victorian Glasgow Boys combined naturalism with a hint of escapism. The one subject...
Romantic at heart
Bridget Riley at the National Gallery.
Bridget Riley may be an op art pioneer, but she remains throughtly in tune with the...
A fine display of vision
“Drawing in Progress” at Mima.
Looking for a 'provincial' collection? You won't find it at mima.
What sort...
Look ahead to 2011
Critic's Picks for 2011
Cuts or no cuts, 2011 is shaping up as a wonderfully rich year for anyone with a love of...
Looking back on 2010
At least one Tate sparkled: Moore and Caravaggio were standout exhibitions
2010 was among other things the four...
Afghanistan
Afghanistan at the British Museum. By Andrew Graham-Dixon.
An ancient bas-relief of a naked boy stands at the start of...
The Emperor Has Clothes
"Chinese Imperial Robes" at the V & A. By Andrew Graham-Dixon.
Entering the Forbidden City from its...
Watercolour
Watercolours at Tate Britain. By Andrew Graham-Dixon.
A year or so before the outbreak of the English Civil War,...
The blue-collar workers of art
Andrew Graham-Dixon discusses sculptor David Smith with Anthony Caro
ANTHONY CARO first met Da-vid Smith in New York in...
Watteau: The Drawings
Watteau: The Drawings at the Royal Academy. By Andrew Graham-Dixon.
Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684-1721) was the most richly talented and...
Cult of Beauty
“The Cult of Beauty” at the V & A. By Andrew Graham-Dixon.
James McNeill Whistler’s White Girl, vestal virgin in a...
Landscaping the lowlands
Dutch Landscapes at the Queen’s Gallery. By Andrew Graham-Dixon.
Over the centuries the British have had something of a love-hate...
A Homecoming
The Hepworth Wakefield. By Andrew Graham-Dixon.
The Hepworth Wakefield is a new purpose-built art gallery in the heart of...
George Bellow
George Bellows at the National Gallery. By Andrew Graham-Dixon.
The building of Pennsylvania Station was one of the heroic feats of early...
The Watts Gallery
The Watts Gallery, Compton. By Andrew Graham-Dixon.
Compton, near Guildford in Surrey, is a quiet village lying on a...
A light in Life
James Turrell. By Andrew Graham-Dixon.
“It’s not the job description of any artist in any way to substantiate someone...
Creative smear campaign
Auerbach back from Venice
FRANK AUERBACH, according to popular legend, gets through eighty litres of paint a month. More of it ends...
Rooms without a view
Andrew Graham-Dixon on the British section of the Royal Academy's three-part series on modern European art
BRITISH ART in the...
The catastrophe culture
ANDY WARHOL'S 1965 Atomic Bomb is a Pop Art apocalypse. Twenty eight identical mushroom clouds are laid out in rows like so many Campbell's Soup...
Treasures of Heaven
Treasures of Heaven, at the British Museum. By Andrew Graham-Dixon.
"Treasures of Heaven”, the British Museum’s principal...
Webb for the unwary
Andrew Graham-Dixon on the odd universe of Boyd Webb
IN A BARE room a man stands precariously on a piano stool, which, tilted crazily...
The Scottish at play
Scots of the art antics: Andrew Graham-Dixon in Edinburgh on recent art in Scotland, and David Salle
EVERYBODY, it seems, has been...
The quiet revolutionaries
Sculpture has undergone a renaissance. Andrew Graham-Dixon on new developments
TONY CRAGG'S Contained Reaction, at the Hayward...
The prodigal sun
WILLIAM HAZLITI once remarked that Turner's paintings were "pictures of nothing, and very like". He meant the late works — those...
Sculptures that refresh the parts
Andrew Graham-Dixon on Richard Wentworth's new show at the Riverside
A FEW years ago, a beer advertisement featured a group of beleaguered...
Particle sculpture
Curved space in plastic and nylon: Andrew Graham-Dixon visits Naum Gabo: Sixty Years of Constructivism at the Tate Gallery
WHEN...
Out on a limbo
Andrew Graham-Dixon on new work by Steven Campbell, Scotland's most successful young painter
IN 1515 Albrecht Durer made an engraving...
Good with Figures
A.R. PENCK, alias Ralf Winkler, Mike Hammer, or simply — the briefest of his pseudonymous fronts — Y, is a German artist of the hippie...
Doing it in public places
Some startling additions have just been made to the urban landscapes of Britain
ANYONE PAYING a visit to Trafalgar Square in the next...
Devotion by Design
Devotion by Design, at the National Gallery. By Andrew Graham-Dixon.
"Devotion by Design" is a...
An oil well that ends well
A tank of sump oil is causing a stir in Hackney. Andrew Graham-Dixon finds out why.
THE BRITISH obstinately distrust art that you cannot...
Canvassing the abstract voters
Andrew Graham-Dixon on John Hoyland's abstractions
WHEN LEONARDO da Vinci ran out of ideas he used to go out and look at "a wall...
Booby-trap art
Andrew Graham-Dixon on Terry Atkinson
TERRY ATKINSON'S recent paintings are twisted, ugly things that look as if they have been...
The name of the pose
Andrew Graham-dixon on Bruce McLean's furniture, painting and performance art
LAST SATURDAY Bruce McLean wrapped a nude model in...
Out of the frying pan
Andrew Graham-Dixon on new works from Bill Woodrow and Jannis Kounellis.
ARMED WITH a set of pliers, a hammer and an electric drill, Bill...
See Delft and die
Andrew Graham-Dixon visits the great collection of Dutch art at the Mauritshuis, which has just been reopened to the public
WHEN...
Beyond the material
ART / Andrew Graham-Dixon reviews the Tate Gallery's retrospective of Mark Rothko, Old Master of abstraction
WALKING INTO the first room of...
Taking the Mickey
Superheroes, Disneyland and modern art: Andrew Graham-dicon review Co mic Iconoclasm at the ICA
THE COMIC STRIP superhero goes back a long...
Double exposure
Andrew Graham-Dixon sees Gilbert and George make an exhibition of themselves at the Hayward Gallery
GILBERT sticks his tongue out in...
Court on Canvas
Court on Canvas, at The Barber Institute, Birmingham. By Andrew Graham-Dixon.
In 1881 Lieutenant-Colonel Robert Osborn...
Pining for the fjords
Landscapes reflect the spirit of two nations.
Landscape painting has always been coloured by shades of patriotism. In 17th-century...
Change at Camden
Andrew Graham-Dixon on British painters' flight into Camden and how childhood didn't grow up
LOOKING down from the window...
Consuming interests
Andrew Graham-Dixon on exhibitions of consumer kitsch and lost innocence
WELCOME to Silvia's place. Make yourself at home....
Cool, calm, collected
Andrew Graham-Dixon on exhibitions whih highlight the relation between collectors and the art of their time
BENJAMIN Robert...
Shoring the fragments
Andrew Graham-Dixon on some new views of classical art
THIS IS the age of the catchy exhibition title. Curators have...
Wandering Jew
From underrated to overrated? Andrew Graham-Dixon on the work of David Bomberg
WHEN DAVID Bomberg died in 1957 he was, in...
The skulls beneath the skins
Andrew Graham-Dixon reviews the major retrospective of Lucian Freud's paintings, just opened at the Hayward Gallery
IN A...
Ballet and Biblical chaos
Autumn preview of art exhibitions. By Andrew Graham-Dixon.
One spring morning in 1877 a French journalist called Francois Thiebault-Sisson...
Pretty vacant
Andrew Graham-Dixon on an exhibition of oversized and vacuum-pácked constructions by sculptor Julian Opie.
A few years ago,...
In the dark wood
Andrew Graham-Dixon reviews the gloomy forests of John Virtue and the dense abstracts of Therese Oulton
IT IS getting...
Alienation and all that
Andrew Graham-Dixon on the gloomy concerns of Denis Masi and Tim Head
A VOICE on the Tannoy announces that you have checked into...
Classical radical
Andrew Graham-Dixon on the Degas exhibition in Paris
THE MASSIVE Degas exhibition at the Grand Palais rescues a great, revolutionary artist...
The all-star cast
Andrew Graham-Dixon on an exhibition of works from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection
BARON THYSSEN-BORNEMISZA, painted by...
Dogs' Dinner
Andrew Graham-Dixon on David Machn at tne Tate, plus Hofman and Turner
DAVID MACH has been responsible for some pretty weird...
Merchant of doom
“John Martin: Apocalypse” at Tate Britain.
To say that the art of John Martin divided nineteenth-century critical...
A labyrinth of bad taste
"Postmodernism" at the V & A.
Postmodernism is a singularly slippery term and there is still...
A Layer Cake of Pastiche
George Condo at the Hayward Gallery. By Andrew Graham-Dixon.
What does George Condo think he is playing at? Hard to say,...
The genius of Leonardo
Leonardo da Vinci at the National Gallery.
Christ as Salvator Mundi, currently on loan to the National Gallery from...
Divine to difficult
Review of 2011.
It goes without saying that the event of the year was (and remains) the National...
Preview of 2012
Preview of 2012. By Andrew Graham-Dixon.
David Hockney: A Bigger Picture, at the Royal Academy, explores...
Troubled voyages
Edward Burra, at Pallant House.
In January 1934, a young English painter called Edward Burra sailed for New...
The Magpie Flies Home
David Hockney: A Bigger Picture, at the Royal Academy.
Who on earth is David Hockney? His...
Stuck in the Waiting-Room
Lucian Freud: Portraits, at the National Portrait Gallery.
Lucian Freud’s death last July at the age of eighty-eight means that the...
Visions of fire and light
Turner and the Elements, at Turner Contemporary, in Margate.
In the evening of 16 October 1834 the Houses...
A flawed Comparison
Picasso and Modern British Art, at Tate Britain.
"Picasso and Modern British Art", at Tate...
Painting in the plague
"Van Dyck in Sicily: Painting and the Plague", at Dulwich Picture Gallery.
It is 1621 and...
The Journey of the Maggie
Andrew Graham-Dixon on an exhibition of British political art in Coventry
OUTSIDE the gallery, a bleak concrete plaza echoes to the...
Giacomo does the locomotion
Back to the Futurist: Andrew Graham-Dixon on Giacomo Baila at Riverside.
MARINETTI, Futurism's driving force, kick-started the...
Scrambled ego
Andrew Graham-Dixon reviews a retrospective of the work of Francis Picabia at the Royal Scotish Academy
FRANCIS Picabia was never...
Beyond child's play
From the Bronx to Hammersmith: Andrew Graham-Dixon on the work of Tim Rollins and KOS
STEVE from Ealing, who is 18, said "I want...
Lucio the Ripper
Andrew Graham-Dixon on Lucio Fontana's violent works
ITALIAN cartoonists of the 1940s and 1950s had a field day with Lucio Fontana, the...
Carnal knowledge
Andrew Graham-Dixon examines the Late Picasso paintings, prints and drawings on show at the Tate Gallery
Shortly after Picasso's...
A deal about pictures, or glory?
Andrew Graham-Dixon assesses what is on offer for the £100m the Government proposes to pay to house the Thyssen Collection
AS U-TURNS...
Venice's far pavilions
Andrew Graham-Dixon on the art world's junket at the Venice Biennale
OVERHEARD in Venice last week: "I reckon we should crash the...
Funding raised to an art
Dramatic Moves are afoot at the National Gallery. In exclusive interviews with its director and chairmant, Andrew Graham-Dixon and...
French connections
Andrew Graham-Dixon on visitors from the Soviet Union
INGRES' portrait of Count Nicolas Dmitrievich de Guryev is a memorable image of...
Brush with the law
Andrew Graham-Dixon on a dispute between an artist and his gallery with wider implications
LAST OCTOBER I wrote an article about a young...
Friendly fixtures
Andrew Graham-Dixon reviews new shows from the painters Lisa Miiroy and Ross Bleckner
Despite the crash of '87 it i seems to be...
On the edge
Andrew Graham-Dixon talks to contemporary artists about where the painting stops
The edge of a painting is its...
Fixed with a Baselitz stare
Andrew Graham-Dixon reflects on the controversial career of Georg Baselitz in the light of an exhibition of his...
Glut reaction
Looking for a scrap: Andrew Graham-Dixon on Robert Rauschenberg and Hans Haacke
In Downtown Manhattan, back in the...
Art of the machine
Andrew Graham-Dixon on the work of C R W Nevinson, An english English Futurist disillusioned by the Great War
WHEN FILIPPO Marinetti, chief...
Bullies for you
Eclectic or confused? Andrew Graham-Dixon on a new show at the Saatchi Gallery
IT'S HARD to make sense of the Saatchi Collection. The...
The devil in the flesh
Andrew Graham-Dixon on the urgent and obsessed early work of Cézanne at the Royal Academy
WHEN EMILE Zola published his novel,...
Graphic equaliser
Andrew Graham-Dixon on the art of Toulouse-Lautrec at the Royal Academy
MISS LOÏE Fuller, preserved for posterity in...
Man of the match
Andrew Graham-Dixon on innovative sculptor Claes Oldenburg's retrospective at Leeds Art Gallery
"I AM for an art that is...
Modern art in the dock
Andrew Graham-Dixon asks whether the contents of the Tate's new gallery live up to its exterior
AS YOU enter the impressive Albert...
Penguin classics
Andrew Graham-Dixon on art in 1940s' Melbourne and the Phillips' collection of modern painting
MODERN ART, like most things, ar-rived late...
Spot the difference
Andrew Graham-Dixon on the Pop art of Roy Lichtenstein and Richard Hamilton in Oxford
"WHAT DO you know about my image...
Square eyed
Images on-screen and off — Andrew Graham-Dixon reviews Nam June Paik and Eisenstein
"HEEEURGH! Ha! Hegug!...
When the sparks fly
In his first interview for many years the painter Leon Kossoff talks to Andrew Graham-Dixon about his work
FORGET topography; when...
With a lipless grin
Andrew Graham-Dixon reviews a retrospective show of the belligerent memorials of sculpture Michael Sandle
The MICKEY Mouse who...
A poor excuse for art
"Alighiero Boetti: Game Plan", at Tate Modern.
Born in Turin in 1940, Alighiero Boetti first came...
This is not a repeat
Andrew Graham-Dixon on the problems raised by reproducing great works of art.
EVERYONE knows reproductions are dis-honest, but it can be...
Swamped by convention
Andrew Graham-Dixon reviews the Tate Gallery's massive exhibition of Hogarth and his age
WILLIAM HOGARTH always knew he was an outsider....
Lost in the myths
Andrew Graham-Dixon reviews new works by Dhruva Mistry and Shirazeh Houshiary
WALTER PATER described Luca Delia Robbia's...
The shock of the old
Andrew Graham-Dixon on artists copying other artists
"GENIUS," wrote Sir Joshua Reynolds, "is the child of...
The blackboard jungle
Andrew Graham-Dixon reviews Cy Twombly's graffiti art at the Whitechapel, and Vessel at the Serpentine
CY TWOMBLY arrives at the...
A museum of mirrors
Andrew Graham-Dixon on a show which bites the hand that feeds it
AT THE LAST count there were 1200 museums in Great Britain and...
Done to Death
Damien Hirst at Tate Modern. By Andrew Graham-Dixon.
Clue: Damien Hirst (anag.)
Answer: Is Mr Death in?
He certainly is....
Britain's got talent
"British Design 1948-2012" at the V & A. By Andrew Graham-Dixon.
In the summer of 1948, a...
Confessions of an artist
Picasso Prints: The Vollard Suite” at the British Museum.
As well as being the most influential painter, sculptor and...
Print isn't dead
Howard Hodgkin: Acquainted with the Night, at Alan Cristea Gallery.
To mark the imminent occasion of Howard Hodgkins...
Extensions of Life
"Superhuman", at The Wellcome Collection.
"Superhuman" is an entertainingly broad-ranging...
The Relics of Victory
The Motya Charioteer, at The British Museum.
With surpisingly little fanfare, the most tantalising marble...
Art of Change
“Art of Change”, at The Hayward Gallery.
The Hayward Gallery’s “Art of Change: New Directions from...
The boy who would be king
“The Lost Prince”, at The National Portrait Gallery.
In around 1605 Robert Peake, Serjeant-Painter to the royal...
Norman Nostalgia
“Cotman in Normandy”, at The Dulwich Picture Gallery.
John Sell Cotman remains a shadowy figure in the landscape of early...
Photographic illusions
“Seduced By Art”, at The National Gallery.
For the first time in more than a hundred and fifty years, the National...
Staring into the abyss
“Art from Russia”, at The Saatchi Gallery. By Andrew Graham-Dixon.
“Gaiety is the outstanding feature of the Soviet...
Waiting for the Worst
"The Peculiarity of Algernon Newton", at Daniel Katz Gallery.
Algernon Newton has been largely...
Pride of Britain
Review of the year
2012 was above all a great year for exhibitions about British art, mostly modern and contemporary. “David Hockney: A...
A table-topping artist
“Lines of Poetry”: Giorgio Morandi, at the Estorick Collection.
Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964) was one of twentieth-century...
Fantasies of refuge
“Schwitters in Britain” at Tate Britain.
A new exhibition at Tate Britain tells the strange and remarkable story...
Going native
“George Catlin: American Indian Portraits” at the National Portrait Gallery.
In 1830, under the rapaciously expansionist...
Divine in the detail
“Barocci: Brilliance and Grace” at the National Gallery.
Who was Federico Barocci? A nervous and sensitive man, to judge...
Dancing around Duchamp
“Dancing Around the Bride” at the Barbican.
What is art? What is its purpose? Who is it for? A young man called Robert...
Reopening the Rijksmuseum
The Reopening the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
A few days ago Holland’s most famous painting, Rembrandt’s Night Watch, was processed...
A Reputation Resurrected
“Murillo and Justino de Neve: The Art of Friendship” at Dulwich Picture Gallery.
Bartolome Esteban Murillo (1617-82) was once...
Artemisia Gentileschi
Artemisia Gentileschi. By Andrew Graham-Dixon.
I am glad to see that Artemisia Gentileschi’s life and work is being celebrated in...
Alserkal Avenue
Nothing can quite prepare you for the experience of approaching Dubai by air. After mile on mile of blank desert, suddenly there it is below you:...
To Russia with Love
Moscow musings. By Andrew Graham-Dixon.
I was in Moscow for a week over the summer, revisiting some of my favourite...
Botticelli's Eternal Beauty
Reflections on Botticelli's Young Man Holding a Roundel
It is part of the magic of certain pictures that they transport you, as if...
Berlin
Berlin. By Andrew Graham-Dixon.
I am always touched by Berlin’s raggedness, the feel it still...
The Albukhary Foundation
The Albukhary Foundation Gallery of the Islamic World
The British Museum is a treasure trove of Islamic art and artefacts. Its...
The Britishness of British Art
When James Christie set up his auction business in 1766, his timing could hardly have been better. The British Empire was in its ascendancy. The...
Cities
There is a cabaret in Paris called Au Lapin Agile where they still sing the old French music hall songs, including Picasso’s favourite,...
Do Not Touch?
I grew up close to South Kensington Tube station, in a part of London so liberally endowed with monuments to the memory of Albert, Prince Consort,...
The Stuff of Painting
When I first studied the history of art, at the Courtauld Institute in London, one of my tutors was the formidable Anita Brookner. Her special...
Edges and Frames
For some reason I have been thinking a lot about frames and edges lately: the places where works of art begin and end, and where they meet the...
What's in a Frame?
I have recently helped two friends of mine choose new frames for paintings that they own. It was an experience that reminded me how fraught with...
Reflections on French Art
I was in France during much of the summer, preparing a new television series on the dauntingly large theme of The Art of France – and...
Full Length Portraits
Every good story needs its subplots – think of Shakespeare, think of the Bible, think of Homer’s Odyssey, which is arguably more...
Grant Wood
In 1930 an unknown American painter named Grant Wood decided to send one of his pictures to the juried annual open exhibition at the Art Institute...
Indian Gifts to an English Prince
I have spent much of this year making a television series about the Royal Collection. The result will be the first televisual history of the...
Being Late
Do artists get better as they grow older? Does their work deepen, as awareness of their own mortality presses in on them? Yes and no, sometimes...
Lighting and Display
Are museums getting uglier, or am I just turning into Mr Grumpy? Maybe both things are happening at the same time. I visited a great many art...
Marriage Portraits
I was lucky enough to get married last summer. It was a quiet ceremony in a tiny neo-Gothic chapel in a remote corner of Scotland. Friends took...
The Old and the New in Italy
I was recently in Turin, one of my favourite Italian cities: great art, great architecture and delicious food, especially in truffle season,...
Monreale
I was in Sicily last autumn. Mount Etna was smoking ominously, dark plumes rising into a clear blue sky. Climb close to the summit and you find...
The Norwegianness of Norwegian Art
To the men and women of Renaissance Europe, Scandinavia seemed impossibly remote and forbidding: a land of perpetual night, frozen for much of the...
Reflections on Notre Dame
The end of the year is usually a time when I reflect on the most rewarding and stimulating exhibitions of the past twelve months. There have been...
Old Friends
I think of my favourite works of art as friends, of a kind. With some, those in the National Gallery for instance, I remain regularly in touch:...
Pieter de Hooch
You might think that museum curators working with Old Masters would have been impervious to the contemporary cult of celebrity. But it seems to me...
Renewed Acquaintance
The remains of the monastery of San Michele a San Salvi are to be found on a side street, close to a tangle of main roads, in a scruffy...
Bridget Riley
Bridget Riley was once the Angry Young Woman of British art. She came to fame in the early 1960s as the creator of a new and aggressively stark...
San Clemente
A friend of mine recently put me to the test with a game of three questions. If I were only allowed to visit one country in the world, which would...
Sergei Shchukin
The desire to collect art can easily develop into a compulsion. In the mind of a truly obsessive collector, the realm of art becomes as real as...
Henry Scott Tuke
One of my favourite descriptions of any artist is Erwin Panofsky’s one-line summary of the fifteenth-century Flemish painter Hans Memlinc:...
Venice
The Venice Biennale is one of the more bewildering events in the calendar of the contemporary art world. Opening week is a frenzied scrum of...
Venice 2
The Venice Biennale is upon us again, which reminds me that I know too many people in the contemporary art world who only visit that beautiful...
YBA Memories
It was the late 1980s and I had just started working as an art critic when I heard about a new group of artists who were doing things differently....
Portraits of Power
The history of the British monarchy suggests that women have a particular aptitude for ruling the waves - and, indeed, for waiving the rules....
A Painter's Salvation
Sandro Botticelli's The Man of Sorrows is a stark and haunting picture. Dating from around 1500, at first glance it looks...
The Vibrant Vitality of British Art
I still own a rather battered copy of a slim paperback, published on the eve of the Second World War, entitled Art in England. I have kept...
Botticelli's Eternal Beauty
It is part of the magic of certain pictures that they transport you, as if in a time machine, straight back to where and when they were made. In...
George Stubbs
There are those who cling to the idea that they cannot be interested in the work of George Stubbs, England’s principal equestrian...
Art of America Ep 2
How visionary artists and architects helped take America out of Europe's shadow.
The Man Who Ate Everything
Andrew presents a personally history of Alan Davidson - one of the culinary world's unsung heroes, and writer of the Oxford Companion to Food.
100% English
Andrew presents a documentary looking into the genetic make-up of people who consider themselves to be English.
Art of China Ep 2
A look at the golden age of art in China - the 10th to the 15th centuries.
Art of China Ep 3
Andrew charts the glorious rise and calamitous fall of China's last dynasty.
Rose Windows
England's medieval heritage of rose windows explored
Henri Rousseau
Andrew explores the life, art and France of Henri Rousseau
The Cosmati Floor
Andrew tells the story of Westminster Abbey's magnificent medieval Cosmati floor, a treasure from the past triumphantly restored
The Royal Academy 1/7
Andrew co-presents coverage of this year's Royal Academy Summer Show with Lauren Laverne
Paul Nash
Andrew reviews the Paul Nash exhibition at Dulwich gallery
Peter Carey
Andrew talks to Peter Carey about his new book.
Klimt
Andrew explores the works of Klimt on the Culture Show
Who killed Caravaggio
Andrew pieces together the scraps of evidence left of Caravaggio’s life and asks the questions that have long puzzled scholars.
RA Summer Show 1/4
Andrew presents the opening of the Royal Academy Summer Show in London for the Culture Show.
RA Summer Show 2/4
Andrew presents the opening of the Royal Academy Summer Show in London for the Culture Show.
RA Summer Show 3/4
Andrew presents the opening of the Royal Academy Summer Show in London for the Culture Show.
RA Summer Show 4/4
Andrew presents the opening of the Royal Academy Summer Show in London for the Culture Show.
Radio 4, Front Row interview
Andrew is interviewed on BBC Radio 4's Front Row programme about his new book "Caravaggio A Life Sacred and Profane"
Radio 3, Caravaggio Essay
Listen to Andrew’s interview on The Essay, as he clears up certain points about the life and art of Caravaggio.
Ai Wei Wei
Andrew Graham-Dixon with Ai Wei Wei at the Tate Modern for the Frieze Art Fair.
Andrew Graham-Dixon at mima
Andrew Graham-Dixon explores what mima have been buying with their recent gift of £1,000,000 to spend on international drawing.
Petworth House
This is a taster of the new program in which I help to 'Spring clean' Petworth House.
Cultural Olympiad
Andrew Graham-Dixon looks at artistic projects in the pipeline for the Cultural Olympiad.
Scott and Shackleton
Andrew Graham-Dixon looks at King George V's photographic collection of Scott and Shackleton's Antarctic expeditions
Cash in China's attic
A snippet from Andrew Graham Dixon's Culture Show special about the Chinese art market.
Grayson Perry
Andrew Graham-Dixon talks to ceramicist Grayson Perry
David Bailey
Andrew Graham-Dixon talks a photo tour of London's East End with David Bailey
Bronze
Andrew Graham-Dixon explores the new Bronze exhibition at the Royal Academy.
Tom Wolfe
Andrew Graham-Dixon goes stateside to meet Tom Wolfe with his new novel Back to Blood.
Samuel Johnson Prize
The second part of our survey of the shortlist for the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction
Lee Child
Andrew Graham-Dixon travels to New York to meet best-selling novelist Lee Child, creator of Jack Reacher
Manet
Presenter Andrew Graham-Dixon previews the art of French impressionist, Édouard Manet as the Royal Academy prepares for a major retrospective of his...
Murillo
Andrew Graham-Dixon explores the work of 17th century Spanish baroque painter Bartholome Esteban Murillo
History of British Art Ep 1
In episode 1 Andrew takes a look at the treasures which survived the Reformation and lie hidden in the corners of our churches and cathedrals.
Renaissance Ep 1
Andrew embarks on a quest to find the origins of the Renaissance.
The Secret of Drawing - Ep 1
From the renaissance to Richard Long, AGD explores how drawing has helped people to understand their place in the universe.
AGD - I, Samurai
Andrew takes a journey into the art and soul of the Samurai, who ruled Japan for 700 years, and were much more than mere warriors...
AGD - Ice Age Art
A Culture Show Special - Andrew travels to Norhtern Spain to visit some of the world's oldest works of art...
High Art of the Low Countries Ep1
Andrew begins in Ghent Cathedral with the magnificent altarpiece by the Van Eyck brothers. In Episode 1 - Dream of Plenty, he explores how the...
Stealing Van Gogh
Andrew tells the true story of the greatest art heist of the 21st century.
Art of France - Ep 1
Andrew explores the art of France from the invention of gothic architecture up to the arrival of Classicism and the Age of Enlightenment.
Art of China Ep 1
Andrew comes face to face with an extraordinary collection of sophisticated alien-like bronze masks created nearly four millennia ago, and travels...
British Art at War - Ep 1
Andrew explores the art of Paul Nash, whose work was profoundly affected by his personal experience of war.
Art of Gothic Ep 1
Andrew explores how the gothic revival influenced popular art, architecture and literature.
Italy Unpacked Ep 1
The first episode of what turned into a four-series (so far) adventure for Andrew and Georgio!Beginning in Bologna...
Italy Unpacked Ep 2
The second leg of the journey takes Andrew and Giorgio to Lombardy, and Giorgio's home town.
Italy Unpacked Ep 3
Andrew and Giorgio move north to Piedmont in the final episode of the series.
Italy Unpacked 3 Ep 1
Andrew Graham-Dixon and Giorgio Locatelli explore the culture and cuisine of the east coast of Italy. They visit Matera, a Unesco world heritage...
Italy Unpacked 3 - Ep 2
Andrew Graham-Dixon and Giorgio Locatelli explore the culture and cuisine of the east coast of Italy. They visit the regions of Le Marche and...
Art of Russia - Ep 1
Andrew tells the story of Russian art - beginning with the origins of the Russian icon, and a monastery founded by Ivan the Terrible.
Secret Lives of the Artist Ep 2
Andrew visits Delft to find out about the turbulent life of the painter Vermeer - often known for his scenes of tranquillity.
Italy Unpacked 2 - Ep 2
Andrew and Giorgio's journey continues, and whilst avoiding Rome, they make some surprising discoveries outside of the eternal city.
Art of Russia - Ep 3
Andrew examines how art was at the forefront of rejecting 1000 years of royal rule.
Italy Unpacked 3 - Ep 3
Andrew Graham-Dixon and Giorgio Locatelli explore the culture and cuisine of the east coast of Italy. The last leg of their journey is in the...
Art of Scandinavia Ep 2
How Denmark became a great power and arbiter of taste in northern Europe - a story of transformation befitting the homeland of Hans Christian...
Art of Scandinavia Ep 3
In the final instalment we arrive in Sweden - home of Ikea and a tradition of brilliant furniture design stretching back to the early years of the...
History of British Art - EP 5
Andrew Graham-Dixon explores the deeply ambivalent attitude of 19th century artists to scientific, technological and social changes in...
Art of Germany - Ep 1
AGD begins his exploration of German art by looking at the rich and often neglected art of the German middle ages and Renaissance.
Art of Gothic Ep 2
As the Industrial Revolution promised more inexplicable wonders of the modern world, Gothic art and literature became both backward and...
Art of Gothic Ep 3
The language of Gothic came to encapsulate the 20th century's horrors, from Marx's analysis of capitalism to Conrad's dark vision of...
Art of Spain - Ep 1
Andrew Graham-Dixon explores Spain's art history. He travels from Cordoba to Granada via Seville, examining the influence of Moorish...
Art of Spain - Ep 2
Andrew Graham-Dixon explores Spain's art history. He discovers how a brutal empire brought a Golden Age of art of the 16th and 17th...
Art of Spain - Ep 3
Andrew Graham-Dixon explores Spain's art history. He reveals how the north of the country has produced some of the most dazzling art of the modern...
Sicily Unpacked Ep 3
AGD and Giorgio visit Mount Etna to find out how its future is linked to its ancient past.
Renaissance - Ep 2
AGD visits Florence, where he puts the city's claim to be the cradle of the Renaissance to the test.
Renaissance - Ep 3
AGD explores the courts of Italy in Florence, Urbino, Mantua and Ferrara in the second half of the 15th century, and considers the role they...
Renaissance - Ep 4
AGD examines the millennial anxiety of 1499, when Europe was gripped by apocalyptic fear as hellfire preachers predicted the end of the world....
Renaissance - Ep 5
AGD visits Venice. The city, founded by refugees and made rich through foreign trade, became the source of the greatest painters of light and...
Renaissance - Ep 6
AGD concludes the series by asking how the Renaissance came to an end and examining its legacy.
Art of Germany - Ep 2
AGD looks at the art of the 19th century and early 20th century and how artists were at the forefront of Germany's drive to become a single...
Art of Germany - Ep 3
AGD concludes his exploration of German art by investigating the dark times of the 20th century, dominated by failed artist Adolf Hitler.
British Art at War - Ep 2
Andrew Graham-Dixon tells the story of artist Walter Sickert, who understood that the theatre of war was not confined to the trenches.
British Art at War - Ep 3
Andrew Graham-Dixon tells the story of David Bomberg, the startlingly original British painter who died in obscurity over 50 years ago.
Art of Italy - The Medici
AGD reveals how the Medici family transformed Florence through sculpture, painting and architecture, and became the financial engine behind the...
Hogarth's Progress
Andrew explores the fascinating world of Hogarth on the 300th anniversary of the artist's birth.
A Night at the Rijksmuseum
Andrew Graham-Dixon goes behind the scenes at Holland's Rijksmuseum as the staff prepare to open the doors following a ten-year renovation....
Viking Art
Andrew Graham-Dixon explores Viking art, which is defined by intricate artistic styles - distinctly Scandinavian, yet influenced by...
Jasper Johns - Raising the Flag
Andrew Graham-Dixon looks at Jasper Johns' images of flags, targets and numbers, which inspired some of the most significant art movements of the...
Max Beckmann
Andrew Graham-Dixon appraises Tate Modern's major exhibition of works by Max Beckmann. An extraordinary artist branded a degenerate by Adolf...
Lucien Freud
AGD looks at Freud's relationship with his sitters and tries to pinpoint his view of the human condition, and explores the influence fellow...
Venus in the Shell
The story of a fresco painter and an escape from Pompeii - from the very talented Frith Manor School children, and Schooling the Imagination.
Prado 2
The second online lecture Andrew gave on the collection at The Prado - recorded in March 2022.
The Imperial War Museum
Andrew visits the new Art, Photography and Video Galleries at the Imperial War Museum in London, and chats to Rebecca Newell about the...
The Courtauld
A flying tour of the top floor of the Courtauld Galleries, and their new display of French late nineteenth and early twentieth century...
Caravaggio Anniversary Lecture
In 2021, Andrew celebrated the 450th anniversary of the birth of Caravaggio with two special Zoom lectures. This is part one..
Rights Information
Rights information
All Andrew Graham-Dixon's work shown on this website may be reused under a Creative Commons...
Profile
Born in London in 1960, Andrew Graham-Dixon is one of the leading art critics and presenters of arts television in the...
Archive
Andrew has written a weekly column covering all aspects of the visual arts for more than 20 years - first for The Independent,...
Books
The Author
Andrew Graham-Dixon has written a number of books about art and artists. His earliest book, Howard Hodgkin (1993), was the...
Public Talks
The following talks are planned for the rest of the year. Tickets can be purchased via the website...
Private Events
Andrew Graham-Dixon is an experienced speaker at corporate events of all kinds. He has opened numerous exhibitions, judged the Turner Prize,...
Contact Andrew
If you have a question, a comment or would like to book Andrew for an event, a tour or consultation complete the contact form below. Please be...
DVD Contact
DVD Application Form Please fill out this form if you wish to apply for copies of any of the programmes...
Rights information
All Andrew Graham-Dixon's work shown on this website may be reused under a Creative Commons License.
Use of images owned by others on...
